The invention relates generally to the field of digital photography, and in particular to the automatic organization of pictures generated by a digital photographic system into a picture album.
The wide-spread use of image capturing and scanning devices such as digital cameras and low-cost scanners is rapidly resulting in the digital equivalent of the overstuffed shoebox full of snapshots. The availability of images in a digital form is further increased by growing commercial digitization of conventional silver halide photography. Furthermore, the Internet has enabled easy distribution and replication of digital imagery, making it convenient for people to readily share pictures with others. This glut of imagery begs for tools for efficient organization and albuming of these images and multimedia data.
One of the main reasons people take pictures or video is to capture the occurrence of events so that they can share these memories and stories with their family and friends. However, a person must often overcome many barriers before being able to effectively convey an intended story from pictures. For example, if someone wants to construct a photo album of her vacation, she would have to go through all the candidate pictures to sort them in terms of the events, the image quality, and to select the best from duplicates, etc. After this organization and sorting effort, she will have a collection of pictures that can be used to construct the album. Then she will have to work out the arrangement or layout of the pictures in the different album pages. This, of course, will involve artistic consideration; the chronology of the events may also be an important factor. Finally, she might wish to add annotations for some pictures in the album pages. We can see that a considerable amount of time and effort is needed in creating a good album. As more and more pictures are being digitized, either directly through digital cameras or through scanners, there is increasing need for automatic organizing and authoring of picture albums.
Many existing digital products offer ways of producing photo album pages from images that have been digitally captured or generated. Microsoft PictureIt, for example, has the capability for pasting pictures into pages and adding special effects to text. Most drawing and photo editing programs have similar capabilities. U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,888,648 and 5,563,722 describe methods and apparatus using a computer for arranging photographic images into albums. In each case, the computer is basically used as an editing tool with which a user systematically and intensively interacts in order to arrange images into the album pages. What is needed is an albuming system that removes some of the burden from the user, e.g., by making at least a first draft attempt to group the images into events according to certain logical criteria, and then to offer to the user a page layout tailored for each event.
The present invention is directed to overcoming one or more of the problems set forth above. Briefly summarized, according to one aspect of the present invention, a method for automatically adapting the page layout of a plurality of images to a boundary condition of an event comprises the steps of (a) receiving a plurality of images having event-determining information that relates to an event to which the images pertain, (b) generating an event boundary for the plurality of images based on the event-determining information; and (c) laying out the images for the event into a page format wherein the page format of the images comprising the event is adapted to the event boundary determined for the event.
These and other aspects, objects, features and advantages of the present invention will be more clearly understood and appreciated from a review of the following detailed description of the preferred embodiments and appended claims, and by reference to the accompanying drawings.
The main effect of this invention is to create and develop a software system or application that enables the automatic organization and albuming of consumer images, such that various albuming features, such as image event clustering, dud identification, duplicate detection and page layout, may be achieved with a minimum amount of user intervention.